When I visit Budapest this spring, it will be with a certain edge of trepidation. Not because the city is so foreign – I’ve paid many visits in the course of writing a book about my Hungarian-born father’s life. I’ve come to love the place. And though this trip is timed to the Hungarian publication of that book, I’m not suffering from the usual interview stage fright. In short, I’m leery of the government. While one side of my book chronicles my father’s lifelong search for identity, the other side examines Hungary’s quest for a national identity, post-communism, and takes to task the current rightwing regime. The problem is: challenging the Hungarian government in print or on air can land a journalist in court.
Shortly after the rightist prime minister Viktor Orban was elected in 2010, a series of punitive media laws were enacted, aimed at silencing a critical press. As a journalist, I’ve certainly been critical. As a dual citizen, I’m subject to Hungarian law. Will I face punishment thanks to this legislation? Most probably not. The law targets Hungarian media outlets, not individuals (though editors can be subjected to harsh fines for coverage that the government finds objectionable). So far, anyway, no book author has been penalized. But no matter how free I might be of the media laws’ letter, I’m aware of its spirit. And the spirit of media repression achieves legislative ends even when the legislation isn’t used. Such is the reign of legal terror.
Donald Trump, in his first week of presidential transition, took time from an uncompleted cabinet search to call in leading media figures and read them the riot act. A remarkable step, whose intent must be recognized, through Trump’s now established demonizing of the press, as intimidation. Throughout the election, Trump – via social media and the new rightwing online media – went on the warpath against the established press. “Let’s be clear on one thing, the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism,” he declared at a West Palm Beach rally in October. “They are political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves. Their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them, it’s a war and for them, nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation.”
As ever, after Trump’s media dressing-down, his operation was quick to fit a velvet glove to an iron fist. “We’re all looking for objective coverage,” Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said. While there was “no need to mend fences, from my own perspective, it is great to hit the reset button”. In this area, as in so many others, Hungary’s recent history shows what a “reset” might look like.
Orban took power as head of the conservative Fidesz party in an election that also elevated the extreme-right Jobbik party. Quickly his parliament passed a battery of laws that undermined the independence of the courts, the central bank, the national elections commission, and a host of government oversight bodies. The Hungarian constitution was rewritten, expanding the powers of the state, curtailing civil liberties, defining life as beginning at conception, and forbidding same-sex marriage. The government began aggressively purging the heads of cultural and academic institutions (a notable number of them Jewish and liberal intellectuals suspected of a “foreign” mindset) and installing in their stead true believers in the Magyar way. It turned a blind eye to paramilitary thugs rampaging through Roma towns and desecrating Jewish monuments, along with far-right parliamentarians calling for a registry of Jews who “pose a national security risk” and “public order protection camps” for Roma. Such measures were roundly denounced by the EU. And secretary of state Hillary Clinton, visiting Hungary in 2011, pleaded for “a real commitment to the independence of the judiciary, a free press, and governmental transparency”. But Orban has found his admirers.
“American media should study Hungary’s record,” Newt Gingrich declared approvingly after a visit to Hungary last summer, lauding a 13ft-high razor-wire border fence that Orban erected against the influx of “foreigners”, Syrian refugees. Gingrich tweeted that the nation has “proven a fence can stop illegal immigration”. Orban and Trump have established a mutual-admiration society, with the American retweeting the Magyar’s encomiums. The prime minister hailed Trump’s victory as “great news” on Facebook.
Anyone looking for a crystal ball for the coming Trump administration would do well to “study Hungary’s record”. And not just for clues about how a rightist strongman can permanently reorder a society and its institutions once it controls the legislature (as Trump and Orban do) and a judiciary (as Orban does and Trump is about to) – but also for how such a politician continues to consolidate power as his policies fail. By the end of Orban’s first term in 2014, a third of the population was living at or below the subsistence level, child poverty was growing faster than in any other country in the European Union, and more than a fourth of citizens were “seriously deprived” (unable to pay for rent, heat, or groceries). Nearly a half-million citizens had left the country, a sixfold increase in emigration since Fidesz took power. A third of the expatriates were college-educated; the brain drain hit healthcare, science, and higher education hard. Orban responded, as Trump is likely to do, by waving the identity flag, a xenophobic call to arms invoking a mythical but useful Magyar golden heritage, a jingoistic nostalgia: Make Hungary Great Again. Essential to this effort is the new Hungarian media law.
Under the 2010 legislation to impose government control over journalism, media outlets have to register and be regulated by the National Media and Infocommunications Authority and face scrutiny by its Fidesz-controlled Media Council, created to sanction vague media transgressions including “unbalanced reporting”, disrespecting “constitutional order” and “family values”, or offending an array of groups from “majorities” to “nations”. The council can impose fines of up to $1m, suspend media operations, and revoke licenses. An early target was Tilos (Forbidden) Radio, an LGBT–friendly station (which, in the early 2000s, had interviewed my father about her gender change).
Large layoffs and purges of dissenters followed. The state media rapidly became the government’s megaphone. In 2014, when Origo, an online news site, reported on the alleged misuse of public funds by the head of the prime minister’s office, the editor-in-chief was forced to resign. But mostly the press silenced itself, out of fear of reprisal. The government also brought private media to heel by diverting public advertising contracts and consolidating ownership in the hands of pro-Fidesz moguls. In the ramp-up to the 2014 elections, broadcast and print media acted as cheerleaders for Orban’s re-anointment. An international monitoring organization found that three of the five main TV channels showed “significant bias towards Fidesz by covering nearly all of its campaign in a positive tone while more than half the coverage of the opposition alliance was in a negative tone”.
In 2010, after the media law was passed, Attila Mong, the anchor of the state radio’s morning show, protested with a one-minute silence on air. He was yanked from his post. “Political pressure was always a fact of life in public media,” Mong told Reuters. “But there were always pockets of professionalism, islands of freedom. That is what changed now. There is no island. One party controls the system now.”
Four months before Orban’s re-election, the Hungarian supreme court issued a ruling in support of the identity prerogatives of the political right. The court found that a TV news channel had violated the media law’s ban on opinionated press commentary by describing the far-right Jobbik party as ... far-right. Jobbik’s lawyers had argued that “far-right” didn’t fit the party’s chosen identity, which was “Christian nationalist”. The judges concurred: “Jobbik doesn’t consider itself an extreme-right party, thus referring to it with the adjective ‘far right’ constitutes an act of expressing an opinion, making it possible for the viewer to associate it with a radical movement and induce a negative impression ... Even a single word, a single epithet, may exert influence on the viewer.”
Last week, Breitbart News, formerly run by Trump’s new chief strategist, Stephen K Bannon, announced that it “is preparing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against a major media company for its baseless and defamatory claim that Breitbart News is a ‘white nationalist website’”. This, despite its hosting articles such as “Hoist It High and Proud: the Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage”. Breitbart’s threatened litigation is especially ominous coming after a bevy of suits won by billionaire conservatives against news organizations, as Emily Bazelon chronicled in New York Times Magazine.
The effects of such actions – presidential demonizing, threats of legal reprisal – are pernicious. As in Hungary, media repression thrives on self-censoring fear to accomplish its own ends. I won’t have to be fined in Hungary to worry about how a media excerpt of my book might be received by the Hungarian government. And I won’t have to be sued or slammed by anyone in the West Wing to know that I live in a less free world of speech. When I return from Hungary to the US next spring, it will be with a certain edge of trepidation. There is no island now.
